If you follow the taxpayer’s money, you will find the trail gets thin by the time it hits a high school classroom — leaving teachers with challenges that could only get worse.

Shippensburg Area Senior High School is like many Pennsylvania high schools that saw the impact of last year’s state budget cuts and legislative gridlock in Harrisburg, according to teacher Jeannie Coons. The school has torn into its reserve funds to make it through the academic year, and has cut costs by doing everything from holding off on buying staples to moving classes online.

The 17-year veteran of the classroom has taught at three schools and has been at Shippensburg’s high school for 12 years. Coons, an English teacher and the Interactive Media club advisor, said education in the classroom is changing from being paper-and-pencil based, to using more computers and integrating the use of cellphones into the classroom.

Using technology in the classroom is becoming more of a necessity because it is important to teach students how to use it for their future, she said. The problem — financing and maintaining technology.

“Laptops for example,” Coons said, “some of them are 6, 7 years old. We receive some of our laptops through grant money from the government. So, as a result we don’t have money to upkeep them. So once they start to fail, they get scrapped and we have nothing to replace them.”

While state budget cuts hurt the school from one side, Shippensburg’s low economic status hurts it from another side.

“Some students don’t have access to things at home,” she said, “because we are in a poverty district.”

Low revenue from property tax, which helps funds public schools in Pennsylvania, are another limiting factor for Shippensburg. Coons said the school does not always have money to buy toner for printers. When printing is not available they switch to using computers, but then the teachers are faced with slow and crashing technology.

“The toner from half the printers is gone,” she said. “We don’t have money to replace that, so yes, it affected people.”

Toner is just one of many things that Shippensburg’s high school does not have money for.

“We ran out of staples,” she said, beginning a list of things that students and teachers do not have or cannot do.

Field trips have been canceled, unless students and parents can pay out-of-pocket for them, and extracurricular activities cannot use electricity after normal school hours. Standardized tests are also forcing teachers to teach to the test, instead of having a more robust learning experience in the classroom, according to Coons. Between limiting out-of-the-classroom activities and focusing lessons on meeting test standards, students are missing out educational experiences.

“Personally, I don’t like standardized tests,” Coons said. “I don’t think they test the true ability of the student.”

Students do not always learn the skills they need for life, because they are so focused on meeting certain criteria, she said. But Coons said she is not sure state standardized tests will stick around if budget cuts keep getting made.

“If they keep changing the test every year for security purposes, is [the test] going to be in the budget?” she said, explaining it is costly to modify standardized tests. “Are they even going to have the test? We don’t even know.”

Standardized testing is not the only thing that has changed the nature of the classroom. Budget cuts forced some students to be turned away from taking certain classes, forcing them to either take online classes or pick another elective, Coons said.

Faculty positions are also being cut. A physical education teacher retired in October, 2015 and was replaced with a substitute. Now the position is being dropped and physical education classes will be bigger, she said.

Shippensburg Area Senior High School made it through the year by using up its reserve funds, Coons said. Her concerns, and those of many other faculty, are about what will happen next year if legislators do not agree on a budget in time, or state funding is not high enough to meet the school’s needs.

“The budget is due again in two months, for next year,” Coons said. “We fear, because all of the reserves are gone now, are the schools going to have to close down if they don’t do it right again this year?”

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